Yeah, right. Boeing's chairman came from Proctor and Gamble, GE, and 3M. He is hardly an "aviation person" so if we are to apply Marin's guidelines for those who should be allowed to comment on Boeing's problems, even he is one of the "ignorant."
Howard Hughes, on the other hand, was a pilot and was quite competent to sit in the left seat.
My "ignorant" comment applies to people outside the industry, which other than SomeSailor and I and the few currently active air transport pilots includes everyone (in my opinion) on this forum.
While McNerney is not a pilot (so far as I know) neither are most of the other people at this company. And while his previous employment was not in the aviation industry it has been for some time now.
Previous employment is sort of irrelevant, anyway. Bill Allen, arguably the most influential CEO Boeing has ever had-- he moved the company into the jet age--- graduated from Harvard law school and joined the Seattle law firm of Donwrth, Todd, and Higgins, which happened to have The Boeing Company as one of its clients. Few people today, particularly all of us at Boeing, would claim that when Bill Allen was the company's CEO, after serving for some time on the board as the company's corporate counsel, he was "ignorant" of the industry despite his law education and his previous employment as a lawyer in a local law firm.
Rick is right, Howard Hughes was an outstanding pilot as well as aircraft designer, at least in terms of concept. I don't believe he was a nuts-and-bolts, drafting-table-type engineer but he came up with some very innovative ideas and had the means to take them to fruition.
While the H4 Hercules, aka Spruce Goose (which has little or no spruce in it) garnered a lot of ridicule, if you go to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in Oregon where it is displayed and learn about the innovative technologies that were developed for its construction, for example, it was a remarkable achievement.
The aerodynamicists and propulsion engineers I've had the opportunity to talk to about the plane since I first saw it in Long Beach in the 1980s said that in their opinion the H4 would have flown just fine. (This is NOT the same thing as saying it would have been a good or successful plane.) The fact it made just the one short, straight flight had, in their view, nothing to do with the limitations of the plane and everything to do with Hughes' attitude by that time toward the project and the government.